IGNFF: Yeah we heard a lot of chorale like (sings), that kind of stuff in the trailer. Lots of huge orchestral stuff...

ANDERSON: Yeah, Harald is a big composer. He's Austrian so he's like Mozart, only alive, and hopefully easier to work with as well. (Laughs.)

I'm very excited about him. The reason why we hired him is that he's such a humongous fan. Again I wanted to go with people's passion for the franchise, their passion for the movies. This guy's a complete Alien and Predator freak. That's what I [also] pursued when I was casting people for the roles, when I was getting the crew together. That was the thing that I most wanted to hear was people's enthusiasm for the franchises, for the existing movies. Harald is no different from any of the rest of the crew in that he's a complete Alien fiend. So he's going to start working very, very soon, we're flying over to London I think this weekend.

IGNFF: So is Harald's music going to be orchestral or...

ANDERSON: It's going to be primarily orchestral, there won't be any source music in there. It'll be an orchestral score probably with a kind of a synth bed in some scenes. But it's very much along the line of the traditional scores that the Alien and Predator movies have had. It's not like we're going to cover the movie in techno music or anything like that. You know, this is a terrifying movie and it needs a terrifying, classic movie score to go with it; at the same time it's got huge action so it needs that kind of proper orchestral support.

IGNFF: Yeah, well I mean some techno is terrifying so...

ANDERSON: (Laughs.) Also one of things that Harald came to do is to work with a lot of high and low frequency noises as well. One of the things he likes to do (because he's done a lot of experimental stuff as well, which you won't find reflected in Roland's movie) is where he samples machinery and animal noises, things like that, and then works those natural and unnatural sounds into music. The idea is that what we'll get is something very, very unsettling.

IGNFF: How about the sound of Predator-vision &#Array; that was a very distinct sound &#Array; will you be able to preserve some of that?

ANDERSON: Absolutely! I mean our intention was to not stray too far away from what the original movies did; the Alien makes a certain sound and the Alien is going to make that sound, Predators make a certain sound and that's the species they are. They're not suddenly going to start making different noises. We're staying very true to the franchises in terms of the sounds of the creatures, in terms of things like graphics, the Predator-vision, we're keeping the same thing.

Predator hunts mainly in thermal mode when he's hunting for humans, obviously he has to shift modes as he did. In Predator 2 you could see that he would shift modes when he was looking for different things, so when he's in that meat locker and he's looking for the lights he shifts to infrared. It's already been established that the Predator can shift to different vision modes and obviously he needs a different vision mode when he's hunting Aliens than when he's hunting humans. Aliens are cold-blooded, so they don't give off the same kind of heat signature that a human does. So we've got lots of different levels of Predator-vision.

It's been really exciting you know, what does a human look like in Predator-vision? What does a Predator look like in Predator-vision? What do they look like to themselves? How much inside an Alien can you see? What's the inside of an Alien look like? I mean that's all been quite exciting. But the basic idea was to keep exactly the same idea for human's thermal-vision and still keep the kind of soundwave to the left hand side of the screen. Obviously we're doing it in much more sophisticated fashion because you know this is fifteen years later and we can. You know, what McTiernan was doing fifteen/sixteen years ago was state-of-the-art, what we're doing now is state-of-the-art but obviously two different arts. It's more sophisticated but it's very much the same template, I always liken it to, it's like the first Predator was running Windows 1.0, and now he's running Windows XP. It's the same operating system but it's very much improved. The same extends to the Predator's weapons as well &#Array; he's got a mix of the traditional weapons, some of which have been slightly improved, and new weapons as well because when you're hunting humans that's one thing, but when you go hunting an elephant you take an elephant gun. When you're hunting an Alien you take something slightly bigger than when you're trying to hunt Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny Glover.

IGNFF: True. So how are you personally holding up, are you dreaming and sleeping Aliens all the time?

ANDERSON: Sleep is a outmoded concept, it's best not to think about sleep.

IGNFF: So you're living and breathing it?

ANDERSON: Absolutely, I mean literally it consumes every waking hour of every day. You do dream about it because it becomes your life, I mean that's all you do is Aliens and Predators. I definitely dream about them.

IGNFF: How are you unwinding these days?

ANDERSON: Um, you don't, you go out and hunt humans in Hyde Park.

IGNFF: (Laughs.) American Werewolf in London style. Anything else you want to put out there as far as what's going on with filming or with post?

ANDERSON: Yeah. It's just that, you know people have been excited about this movie for a long time; for twelve years I think the idea's been out there. We're working our very hardest to make sure that it's been worth the wait. The movie's being made with a lot of people who just love the movies that this film is based upon. [It's] being made with an awful lot of hard work and a lot of Twentieth Century Fox's money ... certainly more than they wanted to spend on it (laughs)...it's been a constant battle but they've moved in the right direction which is very good.

IGNFF: Yeah, well you've kind of got them now...

ANDERSON: They've been very good actually. They've always kind of given more when they needed to, and we're hoping to really deliver on the promise of what this should be. I know for a fact that we've put some amazing Alien and Predator action on film. I don't have to finish cutting the movie to know that, I mean these creatures look the best they've looked and when they go head-to-head, it's like two alien creatures going head-to-head, it looks real, it looks ferocious, it's fast, it's frenzied, it's scary as hell. It's very impactful as well, I mean it's huge! People are going to leave the theaters I think pretty wrung out.

IGNFF: I've always thought of it as getting two elephants together, I mean it would destroy a room, based on their weapons and size&#Array;

ANDERSON: Yeah, I mean they tear these places apart! There was one set where we were filming the first Alien/Predator fight. When we started, the room was made out of all this black stone, it's very cool looking. About halfway through the shoot I was standing with my DP. We were looking at the shot, and we're going, 'There's something wrong, it doesn't look right.' What we realized was that the whole set had changed color because we'd been smashing up so much of it that just the dust from all the rock that had been exploding and breaking had impregnated the entire set! It turned it kind of brown, rather than black. It had become a big problem for us and we had to have the whole thing cleaned because we literally had been causing so much devastation that the whole color had changed.

IGNFF: That's excellent! Was that the temple?

ANDERSON: Yeah, we called it the fight chamber, but that's what happened in there. There were two days of dialogue, and then two months of fight...

IGNFF: You guys had a sizeable fire on the set too, didn't you?

ANDERSON: Um, yeah it was a controlled fire, it got a bit big, a bit bigger than it was supposed to be. I have a very good special effects crew, this German crew who also did Resident Evil for me. They kept saying, 'Well how big do you want the explosion?' I'd say 'Really big.' They'd come back and go, 'You mean really, really big?' [and] I said, 'Really, really, really big.' Then we did the explosion and it was f***ing humongous. I mean you could see it all the way across Prague. It was huge, one of those things where literally airplanes would report it from 20,000 feet in the air because they would see something down there. I went to the special effects guys and said it was just amazingly good, but half the set caught fire and burned down. The studio and producers were insane. I said to [the special effects people], 'Well, how did you do that?' They said, 'Well, it's simple, it was just 40 gallons of gasoline.' It was like the explosion in Apocalypse Now, there's nothing better than just burning lots of petrol in like two seconds, KA-BOOM!

IGNFF: Indeed! When we visited you in Prague, we were shown a clip of everything catching on fire and it was pretty crazy... (laughs)